


Lilies

by scioscribe



Category: The Innocents (1961)
Genre: Dysfunctional Relationships, F/M, Gen, Pre-Canon, Psychological Horror, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-16
Updated: 2017-12-16
Packaged: 2019-02-15 09:12:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13027869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: “No,” Miss Jessel agreed.  “Animals are not unhappy.”  Beneath the desk, she pressed her thighs together, where she could still feel the bruises from where she had held him so tightly, as though a praying mantis holding onto her mate.  “Though they eat each other, you must remember.  I’m not sure anything that will kill its own can know paradise.”





	Lilies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [havisham](https://archiveofourown.org/users/havisham/gifts).



> Referenced toxic-by-way-of-erotic-obsession Quint/Jessel (with Victorian shame in sexual desires). Some Jamesian ambiguity preserved.
> 
> Happy Yuletide!

“When will I wear my hair up?” Flora said.  She was plaiting together a crown of lilies; the stems split so often that the air around them smelled sickly and green.  Though she knew it to be silly, Miss Jessel had hoped to discourage her from picking so many of the flowers.  Each lily had been perfect before it was spoiled.  Each bell-shaped white flower, petals spread out like a lady’s gown, well-formed and unbruised, but no longer.  Miss Jessel had always—and more and more of late—had a sentimental weakness for the beauty of untouched things.

She tried to fix her concentration.  What had Flora asked her?

“When you’re older,” she said vaguely.

Flora was not inclined to accept that as an answer.  “Yes, only I want to know precisely.  I can never get anywhere without a destination.”

The way the children talked never ceased to amuse her, never ceased to unsettle her.  Each word rolled from their lips like a glass bead, such shining separate things strung together, too clear and lucent to be false yet too subtle to be the kind of thing you would expect a child to wear, though her children wore them lightly.  They were garlanded with words.

“When you’re fifteen, perhaps,” Miss Jessel said.  “That is when a girl begins to become a woman.”

“I heard a girl begins to become a woman when she starts bleeding,” Flora said matter-of-factly.  “But I can bleed anytime I like.  If these were roses, I might be bleeding right now.”

“Where do you hear such things?”

Flora did not answer her.  “I only ask because a crown of flowers looks better when one’s hair is down.  Otherwise, it—”  She frowned, and with great concentration, repeated something Miss Jessel had no doubt she had learned from Mrs. Grose in reference to some bit of dressmaking.  “It interrupts the line.”

“I suppose it does, but you have many, many years of uninterrupted rule before you.”  She stood, brushing the front of her dress though she could see no grass on it.  “Shall I crown you, Your Highness?”

Flora held up the crown and closed her eyes.  “I’m not a princess, though.”

Miss Jessel smiled.  “Are you a dryad?”

“No.”  The late morning sunlight turned her eyelids transparently pink, as though they were rose petals themselves.  Could a person cut herself on Flora and bleed from that?  “I only want to be a queen.  I can’t be content with anything else.”

She laughed, but her mind was already wandering again.  Macbeth hath murdered sleep and Peter Quint attention.  The crown of lilies felt unspeakably heavy as she lifted it, each blossom freighted with dew and the stickiness of pollen and the cast-off velvet of foraging bees that had come and gone.  It was not just the green smell of the broken stems, it was the full and waxy smell of the flowers themselves.  A dog that eats a lily will die.  Even a single lily.  In that way had she lost her little spaniel when she was fifteen.

She placed the crown of flowers on Flora’s head, to tangle messily in the long loose strands of her hair.

*

It was unfathomable, unwomanly, indecent, how much she likes getting down on her knees before Quint, taking him into her mouth.  She was tall—was, as he always dismissively put it—tall for a woman; when she was thus, he could stoop easily enough and lay his hand on the back of her neck like a collar.  The things she asked this man to do to her, when she had been an innocent when she’d first come to Bly.

She could not help but hate him for always being willing to satiate this awakened lust. With that mocking smile on his lips.

“What is it that makes animals of us?”  She was supposed to be teaching a lesson, but this kind of lapse happened to her so frequently now.  He had dislodged her hairpins in their latest fierce coupling, her thighs squeezing tight around his hips as if she could stake as much of a claim on him as he had on her.

But the children were capable of taking lessons from anything.  Miles frowned.  “Do you mean Mr. Darwin?”

“Yes,” Miss Jessel said with relief.  “According to Mr. Darwin.”

They were too young to be such avid naturalists, but their knowledge on that score, at least, could never surprise her, for both Flora and Miles dissected grasshoppers and caressed turtles, the first with perfect heartlessness and the second with perfect affection.  Such lessons had they gleaned from her and her lover.

“Mrs. Grose says Mr. Darwin is godless,” Flora said.  “To say we’re descended from apes.”  She did not pass this on like it was authoritative, but only as reportage.  “But I think it’s only natural for us to be animals like everything else.”

“Flora and fauna,” Miles teased.

“Fauna is my reflection,” Flora said to Miss Jessel confidingly.  “But she only lives in the pond, not in a mirror, because she’s always very wild and she can never come inside.”

“It isn’t irreligious in any case,” Miles said.

Being in conversation with the two of them was like living at the bottom of a kaleidoscope that was constantly spinning and tilting, sending fractured colors across the world, always changing her view.  Or was that not so?  She had not felt that way at first, when she had come to Bly and found them very nearly a matched set, beautiful girl and beautiful boy, well-behaved, clever, kind, mischievous but never cruel.

She had written to her cousins and said that they were lovely children.  _In the schoolroom they gobble up books like sweetmeats and then the rest of the day we play as though we were absolute hedonists with nothing else to do; we laze by the pond and crown ourselves the king and queens of Bly.  I know you will disapprove of me very much for enjoying them so when a governess had ought to be stern and proper, but they have been so alone and so lonely, and it does me good—as well as gives me fun—to see them acting their age._

Postmarked two days before Peter Quint’s arrival; a fortnight before her first night in his bed.  And her last night—since then, they had lain everywhere but.  He had had her in this very schoolroom, bent over her desk with her skirts tossed up.  Why did she love him to the point of being maddened with it?

“Miss Jessel?”  Miles, wanting to be noticed for his cleverness.  His voice like a whistle.  “I was saying that it isn’t irreligious in any case—Charles Darwin saying we’re descended from apes.  We must have been descended from something, only in the Bible it’s paradise.  Well, perhaps to be an ape is paradise.  Certainly animals don’t often seem unhappy.”

“No,” Miss Jessel agreed.  “Animals are not unhappy.”  Beneath the desk, she pressed her thighs together, where she could still feel the bruises from where she had held him so tightly, as though a praying mantis holding onto her mate.  “Though they eat each other, you must remember.  I’m not sure anything that will kill its own can know paradise.”

*

How strange, she thought sometimes, to have one’s world be only a single house, a single estate.  Mrs. Grose thought there was nothing the matter with it—had lived her whole life that way—and was not speaking much to Miss Jessel now in any case.  So there was nothing else for her to do but dwell upon it.  Dwell, to dwell, a dwelling.  She did not have conversations with Quint: whatever insights he had, he saved them for Miles, who listened so avidly, his face still and upturned.

Bly was like a villanelle, repeating itself again and again, changing the meaning of sights you had seen before and at first thought you understood; it was a song with a monotonous chorus.  She taught Flora to dance to such songs, humming and singing them, their feet making patterns on the sun-warped floorboards of the gazebo.  Miles curled up on one of the benches singing to them, singing “O Willow Waly,” the song from her music box.  The way you heard things again and again, the song reappearing as Quint took her but only after first cranking up the ballerina to dance, thrusting hard in rhythm with the song.  Why should it spoil it for her?  Why, when all of this was what she wanted?

Perhaps because it meant she was the ballerina, spinning in one place in her box, her only delight when she could be wound and unwound, be jolted into these old familiar movements.  She had not thought her life dull until he came.  She had not thought herself mad.

 _It is only the stillness_ , she thought.  _Only the silence of a house with so few souls inside it.  Even the children run out of things to say._

To rid herself of it, she had given the music box to Flora and now she wondered if that had not been right, to take something so tainted and pass it along to a child.  Though Flora had seen them that day—so vigorous on the sofa that Miss Jessel had reached out to steady herself and knocked the lampshade off a lamp—and had not seem startled by it.  Had she thought that animals did not seem unhappy?  Had she thought it was only another kind of dance?

Flora made a second crown of lilies and coaxed Miss Jessel into letting down her hair so she could wear it.  The lilies too repeated themselves.

“Next time perhaps I’ll use roses,” Flora said.

“They would look very pretty, I’m sure, only I shouldn’t want you to prick your fingers on the thorns.”

“But I told you all girls must bleed sometimes.”  She began, very slowly and very meticulously, to trace each glimmering strand in a spiderweb.  “ _He_ says so too.”

It was useless to pretend she did not know what Flora meant.  “ _He_ is often wrong.”  She could say such things only when she was sure he would not hear them—how brave, to be appalled by her suitor yet never risk being refused by him.  How noble and ladylike.  With sudden savagery, she grabbed hold of Flora’s hands, ignoring that Flora had found her wild roses after all, ignoring that she was driving a thorn into the pad of Flora’s thumb.  “Darling, you know I’d do anything for you, don’t you?”

“No,” Flora said, as though she were thinking it over.  She did not sound angry.  “No, I don’t know that.”  She tugged a lock of Miss Jessel’s hair.  “Goodness, how pretty you are like this.”

*

She began sometimes to see a woman across the pond, a woman all in white like a lily, a woman who wore her hair up while Miss Jessel wore her own increasingly down.  She was as wholesome as a child.  Which was to say, Miss Jessel thought, not so very wholesome after all.  Fauna within Flora.  She felt her hair down around her shoulders, the weight of it heavier than any lust, and felt herself the animal to that lady—felt herself a beast to frighten tame women.

 _If I walked across the water,_ she thought, _I would become you and you would become me, I an innocent and you—_

She could see Flora dancing in the gazebo and although that did not seem right—although it seemed as though she had left Flora somewhere else—she loved the sight of her there so well that she was content to stay where she was, in the reeds and tall grasses, and watch.  She felt like a portent, some sign not to stray from the path.  Her head ached.

The woman across the pond did not look away from her.  Her mouth was open with horror and hunger.  Exhausted, Miss Jessel realized some sympathy with Quint after all.  How awful it was to feel someone longing for you to be monstrous, merely so they could be corrupted.  It could make you feel like you were not there at all.  You would want to do anything, anything to stop it.  You would want to fuck.  You would want to die.  You would want to allow yourself to slip, to walk into the depths, to say, _See, wear my skin and see how you like it.  
_

She could not hear the music anymore.  Perhaps Flora had stopped singing.  Perhaps something, at last, had come to an end.


End file.
